As Russian columns advance into Georgia proper, columns in the American press fill with dire warnings and withering contempt for anyone so puerile as to ever trust a Russian. George Bush's infamous glimpse into Putin's soul failed to recognise what nostalgic cold warriors have always insisted was pinned to his sleeve: a heart that beats for lost imperial glory, and a ruthless ambition to match. Blogging at the Weekly Standard, John Noonan describes the Georgia conflict as the consequence of "Chamberlain-esque conflict aversion". National Review's Jonah Goldberg cries that "this is what happens" when the west takes its eye off the Russians to enjoy the Olympics.

"This", of course, is the brutalisation of a hapless, innocent, fledgling democracy – a role played to the hilt by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who has spared no absurdity in his increasingly haggard efforts to trigger a western bailout of his hasty and ill-advised weekend invasion of long-autonomous South Ossetia.

Saakashvili's overheated rhetoric – "If the whole world does not stop Russia," he has remarked, "then Russian tanks will be able to reach any other European capital" – is illustrative of the kind of feverish thinking that is sure to transform a regional crisis into a global one. But where the frustrated desperation that Saakashvili has brought upon himself seems to explain his descent into hyperbole, American commentators have no such excuse. The real wake-up call placed by the Russo-Georgian conflict is not a clarion to a new cold war, but a head check for pro-democracy ideologues – whose idealism has ratified a style of sloppy thinking and rote sloganeering that actually threatens the durability of representative government around the world.

The anti-Russia lobby is giving the pro-Israel lobby a run for its money, hyping the settling of scores among two European, Orthodox Christian countries as more dangerous to the peace and security of the west than any clash of civilisations or jihad ever was. Casting this conflict as a 9/11-style litmus test of patriotism and humanity, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball praises John McCain as a man who "knows evil and repudiates it", deriding Barack Obama as one "crippled by moral relativism" for daring to admit "fault on both sides". For Kimball, Russia, "uncivilised" as our terrorist enemies, affords the added menace of a disgruntled ex-superpower hell-bent on "an imperialist mission". Meanwhile, at Slate, Anne Applebaum balefully warns that Russia may make "Islamic terrorism" look like "the least of our problems".

This will only come true if the west, in a paroxysm of fear and loathing, makes an enemy of Russia – which, indeed, would be a far more formidable foe than Iran, Hizbullah, and al-Qaida combined. No strategy against jihad can succeed with Russia aligned actively against the west. But no Russian official has expressed a desire to eradicate Georgia from the face of the earth, or drive the Georgian people into the sea. Nor are motives like these driving an illegal and destabilising Russian nuclear programme. Nor is our friendship with Georgia quite as deep and profound as our friendship with Israel.

Despite moans of wishful outrage to the contrary, the small, democratic ally is not a Weberian ideal type or a Platonic form. Saakashvili is a deeply imperfect leader, prone to beating his domestic opposition in the streets, and the Georgia he leads is a country that has been fragmented from birth.

The anti-Russian reaction obscures the basic particularity of the Georgian situation, and all the history that informs it. These lost, sound judgment in pursuit of even a forthright agenda of assertive democracy promotion becomes impossible. Treating the Georgia we see on the map as if it were as sovereign and whole as the state of Israel, or Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, sets us down a path of danger and confusion. But the pro-democracy ideologues confusing big hearts for big brains make this mistake by design.

The fact of the matter is that the territorial integrity of Georgia has been continuously undermined from within since the Abkhazians and South Ossetians first rebelled in the early 1990s. A central contention of the anti-Russian crowd holds that Georgia today would have been saved, if only the west had the courage to admit the country into Nato at once. But Nato membership was in large part imagined to smooth Georgia's reassertion of sovereignty in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In short, the integrity of Nato was to be gambled on precisely the sort of move Saakashvili has just engineered to such catastrophic effect – and on the odds that Russia would abandon its citizens in those territories to frank and open aggression. How democratic.

Another talking point advanced relentlessly by the anti-Russians proclaims, per Saakashvili, "today Georgia, tomorrow the world". The editors of the Washington Post have railed that:

The principles at stake, including sovereignty and territorial integrity, apply well beyond the Caucasus. To abandon Georgia and its fragile democratic Rose Revolution would send a terrible signal to other former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics that to Moscow's dismay have achieved or are working toward democracy and fully independent foreign policies.

Would that these sacrosanct principles had applied to Serbia, which fought on just those grounds to keep Kosovo an integral part of its recognised territory. But the west recognised that European integration and American good faith would both have been profoundly damaged by stiffing the Kosovans; and in a sound calculation that combined realpolitik with democratic principle, Kosovo was recognised as an independent state of the sort that, soon, Russia will be recognising Abkhazia and Ossetia as. Indeed, it is hard to see how the Georgian taste for democracy is any weaker than the Kosovan, or how the fate of Abkhazia and Ossetia affects the fate of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, or the Baltics – long-sovereign nation-states without ungovernable autonomous regions, and Nato members to boot.

The fact remains that even if Russia were to squander its advantages and foolishly conquer all of Georgia, the consolidation of democratic, representative government on mainland Europe would be unaffected. American foreign policy, however, would not be. As much as we must work not to make an enemy of Russia, we cannot rule out the possibility that Russia, in its zeal to teach Georgia a lesson it will never forget, may be willing to risk making an enemy of America. Given the jingoism coming from American quarters, Russia enjoys, as is its wont, plausible grounds for appealing to the simple logic of tit for tat.

The natural response is the firm but fair stance taken up by Barack Obama and the Bush administration – cognisant of the complex of blame in the Caucasus, but adamant that Russia not devastate Georgia without consequence. The alternative, typified by the anti-Russian caucus present within the McCain campaign and the American commentariat, is to romanticise Georgia and demonise Russia out of all proportion – not so dreadful, as election-year shenanigans go, but for the most imprudent and destructive policy that must follow upon it.